Laurie Sheck Read online

  Mary and Shelley sleep and I watch them, their limbs intertwined, his fingers moving in her hair. Our beds are dirty, we have little money. Mary carried a small locked box with her all the way from England. I don’t know what’s inside. We walk for hours each day and none of us has a watch.

  Mary and I still wear our black silk dresses. We’re heading toward the Alps at the Swiss border. Nights we find cheap places to stay, eat milk and sour bread for supper. Why does she carry that locked box when it’s so hard to carry anything at all? Shelley says we’ll get a mule soon. Then we can take turns resting as we travel.

  Skinner Street—it’s far away now, Snow Hill’s far away. But I dream of snow-lions, I dream of Hadrian impetuously giving orders, so how far have I come? I don’t know what freedom is I The Madame at the inn warns us of Napoleon’s disbanded soldiers, says they’re roaming and pillaging. Urges us to turn back. But there’s finally peace here and we want to see it.

  Her hand stops, replaces the top on the ink bottle, puts down the pen, folds the paper, slips it in the drawer.

  Her face hidden as before. Her name on my tongue an amulet or wish.

  The whiteness of her sleeve before she leaves me.

  “Magnetic needles always skew slightly east rather than purely due south,” Shen Kuo wrote in the eleventh century, in China. (As this North in me also leans, grows errant, is odder and less stable than I thought.) Every night for three months he observed the course of the polestar, and three times every night for five years recorded the changes of the moon for his Celestial Atlas. In his Dream Pool Essays he explained how the magnetic needle compass could be used for navigation. It’s said he was the first to identify true North.

  (If I could talk to him, if he were here. But these distances in me, immeasurable, without markers.)

  My book says he was an astronomer, mathematician, pharmacologist, botanist, encyclopedist, diplomat, general, hydraulic engineer, inventor— also a finance minister and governmental state inspector. He was Head Official of the Bureau of Astronomy, and, at one time, Assistant Minister of Imperial Hospitality. He improved the designs of the armillary sphere, the gnomon, the clepsydra clock, the sighting tube. How could he be and do all those things? The way this ice goes on in glaring sameness makes it all the harder to imagine such multiplicity within one single life, one brain, one being.

  It’s said after his father died he withdrew from the world in mourning for three years. Once, out of a deep mysterious sorrow, he attempted to drown himself in the Yangtze River.

  (As Claire’s hand’s mysterious even as I read the things she leaves.)

  Only six of his many books survive. Even his tomb was destroyed.

  Did Dream Pool Essays even exist, or is it, like Inventio Fortunata, heard of and talked about but maybe never seen? And what of his Record of Longings Forgotten at Dream Brook, in which he wrote of his youth in the isolate mountains, has that been lost too?

  When I focus my eyes they’re met by raised white ridges, low white plains. Whole stretches barely touched by human thought. Cape Flora. Cape Mary Harmsworth. Bell Island. Alexandra Land. White Island. Teplitz Bay. This archipelago with its hundreds of ice-covered islands. “A glacial prison,” one called it. But another said, “The most beautiful place on Earth.” And others: “the edge of the world,” “a circle of mysteries,” “a sheer blank,” “a longing.”

  (If touch were possible … If I could understand resemblance … Or are objects made of thought as well as matter?)

  Now, here and there, airstrips, military installations, wooden huts, radar stations, abandoned makeshift camps, a graveyard. Every now and then the sound of fighter planes landing, taking off.

  (Shen Kuo, is this what you dreamed of?)

  I wait to see the northern lights, remember how Payer described them after being ice-locked for two years: “Waves of light drive violently from east to west, but are they shooting downwards from above or upwards from below? Rays move fast as if racing each other. In the center is a sea of flames. Is it red or white or green? It seems to be all three. Everyone stops moving. It’s impossible that such violence isn’t accompanied by an equally violent sound, but we hear nothing. Then just as quickly as they came, they vanish.”

  Are thoughts a form of violence? And human wishes seeded with a hidden violence?

  I look out on this white ice, wait for something to destroy itself in me, immolate and fly past itself in me. I hear light waves, icebergs, flames, fighter planes practicing maneuvers overhead. But not your voice in my mind. Not your wishes or the way you left me.

  Mary’s writing a story called “Hate”—I don’t know why We walk most of the day sometimes ride in a diligence, but we hardly have money for such things. At Nogent and St. Aubin the houses were rubble, the people left so poor by the war they just laughed when we asked them for a place to stay. Soon Mary will be seventeen.

  She’s writing in an oblong notebook bound in red leather with a broken metal clasp. Some of the pages burned at the edges. Writes the name Mary Jane Clairmont on the inside front cover. Crosses it out. Turns the page, writes August 13, 1814. Turns it again: a pencil sketch of a face. On the next two pages there are words in someone else’s hand: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate” and “Nondum amabam & etc., (August. Confess., Bk. III, Cap. I).”

  Has it been hours, days? Her hand continues writing:

  But sometimes IXXX sometimes I don’t feel bold though I don’t say it. We walk through narrow streets of old towns, past buildings black with age, the sky black with rain, and I don’t understand what freedom is … and yet I want to understand. Then the land opens up again but even the rocks in their wild freedom seem bare and awful and I didn’t want to ever think of them that way. They rise over each other, jut against each other. I don’t want to return to Skinner Street, not ever. Those rats that ran over my face at the Inn where we first slept, I still feel them. Even now they run through my mind, and in my mind Shelley says, Stop thinking, it’s good to think but not the way you think.

  Why must there be an immense chain thrown across the barrier-valley between France and Switzerland? It’s attached on both sides to the highest mountain peaks in times of War. Ugliness cast over the land. These scarrings we bring to the land. Yet they had a revolution, they tried to make themselves free.

  I want to see the Alps.

  I tell Mary and Shelley my name’s Claire now. Only call me Claire.

  Shelley’s hurt his ankle so we walk more slowly. Immense forests on all sides—

  Trapped in ice for two years the Russian ship Saint Anna drifted northward for 2,400 miles. There was no coal or wood left for heating. Little food. For light and some warmth they burned bear and seal fat mixed with machine oil. The navigator, Albanov, and a few crewmen, finally set out by sledge in search of land, traveling for ninety days over ice and glacial rock to reach Cape Flora.

  (As I wandered from you from the start, though I had no place in mind to get to, only knew I was alone. You’d looked at me and fled.)

  Of the ones who remained on board no trace was ever found.

  Albanov kept a diary: “I have severe pain in my eyes and write only with great effort. The route is so difficult we managed only two and a half miles in spite of our efforts. Last night there was thick, freezing fog. Understanding the movements of pack ice doesn’t make it any easier to cross. I have been having persistent nightmares. I dream there are only two of us left. But every few minutes I walk over to my sole companion who’s busy digging in the ice and ask about a third. I am sure there is a third. When I wake my legs are swollen and painful.”

  What have I wanted from this North? Albanov dreamed of Christmas dinners, plates piled high with fruits and steaming meats. He dreamed of music, dancing, warm blue sea.

  He craved darkness: “This dull light makes one’s eyes so terribly painful. Only in complete darkness does the pain gradually abate, allowing me to open my eyes again.”

  What do I crave? Not the darkne
ss you left me in. Not the sense you must be beside me in that dark.

  If I had been permitted to remain in silence, and fled away and climbed some rocks—no one watching or caring what I did—& so on and so forth from step to step—XXX maybe then … but the words burn and crowd too close to one another and everything’s anarchy sometimes, no King of me no steady Queen—I wake in the night wondering what I belong to, what to name myself, where I am.

  I’d like to know what a Pack Horse is. I’d like to know why this stove doesn’t work. Shelley says we have to travel back to England because the stove doesn’t work and we’re cold but that makes no sense. I thought I’d never see those cliffs again. Didn’t want to see them again. Every side of me shut sometimes.

  At first I thought the Alps were white clouds. Then I saw they were really the Alps—peaked and broken. Everything’s clean in Switzerland. Everyone suddenly hospitable and cheerful. We asked a Swiss man why everyone seems so happy, “Ah it is because we have no King to fear! When we have paid our rent to the Seigneur we have nothing to dread. We don’t even have to take off our hats to him.” But it’s impossible to find a wild and entire solitude, the people multiply, the land’s too lush and easily tamed, no spot’s deserted.

  Inside the mind so much is hard and unmeaning. Every side of me shut sometimes. And myself without government. So be it. My self without. I would like to know what safety is. I would like to know what freedom is. I would like to know why Mary sickens often, fevering and weak, as if she’s finally left a blackened town but then must go back around to it again, and no boat can take her farther.

  So much becomes suddenly harsh and afterwards. I must study my Greek, must learn the four tenses of the verb to strike—Must buy new shoes.

  The faint watermark—WT—floats on each thin page, then disappears beneath her chestnut ink.

  The navigator, Albanov, had visions as he walked: “The sun is a ball of flames. It’s torrid summer. I see a port. People are strolling in the shadows of the high harbor walls. Shop doors are open. Peaches, oranges, apricots, raisins, cloves, and pepper all give off their wonderful scents. The ground steams with heat. Persian merchants are offering their wares.”

  “We’re all sleepwalkers.”

  On July 5, after walking for nearly three months, he writes in his journal that Nilsen’s dying. “He can hardly move, has lost the power of speech, mumbles only with great difficulty.” Then his attention turns to a huge block of floating ice “on which we spotted two large walruses and one small, about the size of a cow.” Then back to Nilsen: “He’s no longer responding, stares with a glassy look. We construct a makeshift tent out of some sails, wrap him in our only blanket.”

  Then: “Sunday July 6, As we expected Nilsen was no more than a corpse this morning. Remarkably he did not display that terrible waxen pallor that makes the face of a corpse so ghastly. His features were calm. We wrapped the body in the blanket and carried it by sledge as far as the next terrace, roughly nine hundred feet. Not one of us wept for this man who had accompanied us for months, shared all our dangers, fatigue, and hardships. What does this say of us? What have I become? Nilsen has disappeared. His hopes and everything he lived for no longer mean a thing.”

  Have I headed north not to feel, as Albanov came to believe he couldn’t feel? He mourned this in himself. “What does this say of us?” “What have I become?”

  In my sleep I hear Albanov talking to Nilsen though Nilsen isn’t there: “We heard the calls of countless birds winging their way overhead, but our snow-blinded eyes weren’t able to see them.”

  For weeks she doesn’t come. My days emptied of her, of anyone. On this map I’ve found: broken land-masses marked by black letters. Mt. Misery Novaya Sibir, White Island, Savina, Black Cove. Two islands called: Existence Doubtful. This world hidden from itself, mysterious even to itself. The blue arrows must indicate the directions of the currents. (Haven’t I sought such arrows in myself?—but little has come clear.) Then cordoned off in a rectangle in the lower right-hand corner:

  PHYSICAL CHART OF NORTH POLAR REGIONS 1897.

  By J. G. Bartholomew, F.R.S.E.

  What did J. G. Bartholomew, F.R.S.E. think as he wrote in Existence Doubtful?—he who most likely never saw a single place he charted.

  “Our veiled, damaged eyes,” Albanov wrote.

  “Only the darkness helps. Sunlight is too painful.”

  “Suddenly I spot some tiny yellow flowers. Imagine, after all these years! When I get closer I see they’re only rocks.”

  “The brighter light is giving us violent attacks of snow blindness. Even close objects appear as if seen through muslin. Sometimes we see double.”

  (If I could see intervals as well as objects … If intervals are shapes in their own right, then were those shapes around the bushes where I read the contours and forms of my own hiding?)

  “The sun blinds us even at night in our tent, coming in through every crack and slit in the canvas.”

  In the weeks before Albanov left, Captain Brusilov stared through fevered eyes. “In his delirium he looked like a skeleton covered not with skin but rubber. He would ask whether the horses had been given hay or oats. ‘What horses are you talking about, Georgii Lvovich? We don’t possess a single horse. We’re in the Kara Sea, trapped in ice, aboard the Saint Anna.’ ‘The horses over there,’ he’d reply, ‘the ones nuzzling Nurse Zhdanko.’”

  (Claire read of a woman, Eloisa, whose eyes were covered by a veil. Even here, in so remote a place, a security veil of sonar and electric eyes monitors enemy aircraft traversing airspace that’s divided, owned.)

  I thought words could train me to see better, but often it seems they just throw a scrim over everything. Even my name shifts around, I call myself Clare, then Clara, then Claire, can’t decide. Still, the banks of the Rhine are very beautiful, the river itself more narrow than I would have thought. Sometimes when I read it’s as if my eyes finally have a place to go to for a while where my sight feels clearer. I don’t think about how after I close the book the words will come back and maybe drown, or flap and hurl themselves against each other, and how the mind’s like discord in music. I heard Mary talking to Shelley about my “blind manner.” I keep thinking of the Duke of Gloucester’s eyes, that his eyes were torn out, and yet a separate tenderness came after. Somewhere this road still continues—XXX though Shelley says we have to turn back.

  What of my own eyes? Why did you give them to me, what did you want them to do for me? “The orbits of the eyes,” Goldsmith wrote, and each day my eyes open to this sky, to her hand that comes when it pleases. My eyes rapt within force fields not their own, obedient to laws not their own. “The Sight of the Mind differs very much from the Sight of the Body,” but I don’t think I can tell them apart. “The blind’s visions are visions of touch,” Bain wrote, so isn’t touch a form of seeing? My eyes cast chains over everything until nothing I touch with them seems free. So isn’t sight a builder of prisons, and watching a form of taking prisoners? Once I came across the term eye-sorrow. Though I don’t know exactly what it is, I’ve often felt how seeing’s somehow sorrowful at the core. Guns are used to sight. The center of a flower is called its eye. Why would I have thought I could find a place where my eyes would seek nothing, my mind nothing? Even here: electric eyes on the airstrips spot and track hostile traffic. Albanov would have known a boat can’t “walk in the wind’s eye,” that the calm at the center of that eye, though quiet, is also desperate. I think of the eye of a furnace, painted eyes on prows of ancient ships—

  I wonder who left this copy of Nansen’s Farthest North? Spine broken, green cloth binding torn, it’s inscribed to: Josiah L. Hoale, from his aff grandmother. December 25th, 1897. I look through the index: Arctic thirst; Bacteria in ice-water; Bandaging; Books—longing for; Clothing-deplorable condition of; Cloudberry flower; Dogs—harnesses, kennels, killed by bears, killed by their fellows, paralysis in legs; Eclipse of the Sun; Head shaving; Homeward; Ice—first meeting with, rate of f
ormation, white reflection from; Journals—difficulty of writing; Moons, remarkable; Musical instruments.

  And: Poppies; Red Snow; Shoes; Shrimps—vomited by Arctic rose-gull; Snow blindness—cases of; Sun—disappearance of; Telescope; Watches-run down; Wounds, Wrist-sores, Yugor Strait.

  XXX but the joy, too, sometimes—the XXXXX and again I think how the mind’s like discord in music. But it’s impossible to find a XXX it’s impossible to find a wild and entire solitude, or one name to belong to

  XX

  then I go downstairs for breakfast (today we begin heading back) and Mary doesn’t want to look at me I don’t know why. Shelley says I was sleepwalking again, that in my dream the stairs were rushing water there was no way I could get down. He says that’s what I told him but I remember nothing XXXX so what’s seeing when I remember none of what I saw? What’s knowing? So many stairs unbuilding themselves inside my mind. Horace said the soul is at fault which never escapes from itself but how can it escape from itself? Ruins everywhere … and that chain across the valley. Chains of black hills at Maas-Sluis. Yet I want to see everything, no vanishing line noXXX XXXX and nothing making concessions to anything else. I would see the coexistence of all things. The near coin and the far moon—